Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG6w0IAoT4U

As for what I do? I work in basically a state run monopoly that is so big and has such large teams that managers oftentimes think you're awesome if nobody has anything negative to say.

The OP said they’d been in the industry for 2 decades, so they may have got into the workforce at the end of the dot com bubble. It wasn’t pretty for people who had been in the industry for a 5-10 years. Many forced career changes, big salary cuts, early retirements, depending on the person’s reputation, CV, and skills.

I don’t think the next contraction will be nearly as globalized as the dot com contraction, but it’s worth assessing whether your niche or specialty is prone to that kind of lull in the hype cycle.

In a contraction, the interview charades of big tech are replaced by street cred, because nobody can afford to hire deadwood. It’s brutal to be mid-career with no street cred in a recession, and one should try to avoid it.

I’m not saying one should avoid work in web3, autonomous driving or whatever, but it’s prudent to have an escape hatch just in case.

Be known as a hard worker, smart, and genial, and invest in developing skills that legitimately create value for any company, and you’ll be OK. It can be tempting to coast, but it’s not an effective strategy if your industry i has bearish downturns during your career.

This is happening because nobody care in your company.

The bigger the company, the more the layers of middle managers, the more the pocket of productivity where someone can hide and do little. Join a startup and they founders in person will overwork you to the bone.

Having seen a few organisations I have a personal scale that goes from solo founder to government of a country: the more you get closer to a government, the more you see resources being wasted (of money, of time, of talent).

When I've been on the manager side, I punished a few underperforming engineers (which led to team change and then firing, as per company policy) but I could have very well avoided the discussion completely; my boss had no idea about my performance or about the performance of my teams. Even if he asked I could have easily come up with 10 different excuses about why productivity is so low. I had no incentives to get those people fired; I didn't get a raise; the probability of my company's stock being worth more because of that may have increased by some uber minuscule amount (mid companies tend to obsess about increasing returns while making sure no-one in the company has a chance to innovate, to experiment, to fail and try again; employees input is a tiny percentage of making a profit on equity).

The lack of accountability starts at the board of directors. Not a lot of people really care deeply about a company that sits on their fund's portfolio. Sometimes, even when they care, they tend to be too polite to underperforming managers. That lack of accountability trickle down through managers up to individual contributors. Every X years, after the company, unsurprisingly, doesn't deliver the expected returns the board decides to go into nazi mode, cut everything down for a bit and then go back to not caring.

On top of this horrible corporate lifecycle, the work done by engineers can be clouded pretty easily so evaluating poor performance vs poor conditions is not easy.